IMHO, that Register article is misleading.
Plan 9 isn't becoming a GNU project, it is just becoming available under the GPLv2 license, the same as Linux.

I don't know if I'm confused, or someone else is. I just downloaded the iso image from bell-labs.com. The thing would'nt boot on any of my machines, so I mounted the iso file directly. In the root directory are three license files. One is the old time Lucent license (LICENSE.LPL), another is version 2 GPL (LICENSE.GPL), and the last is just plain "LICENSE"

In the "LICENSE" file, it says that the license for Plan 9 is the LPL, but that specific included fonts are GPLv2 licensed.

My quick grep of the source directories indicated "LPL" for many of those files. The only places I saw GPL was in font related, antiword, diff, patch, cifs, and ghostscript files. Oh - and a couple games.

Is there a more recent set of images (other than bell-labs.com) that has files with a different license? This is probaby a license tweak that was misinterpreted...